"Morphine"

"Morphine"

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Mira Rosenthal read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes..

The window to this world opened againas the drips slowed, and she becamewhippy as a sheet of glass improperlyannealed, ready to smash at anyindefinite touch in a whining matrixof stresses, the bed frame a museum boxwhere she lay, encased as a mummifiedkestrel tailed with a fleece of fetid clothlaid out by the mongoose (pharaoh's rat)cradled in the nook of a dead arm,and her eyes were intensified as soupwith beef bouillon and parsnip, potato,celery ends, the candor of bread and butterto swallow the fact of what happened.

The line "whippy as a sheet … of stresses" is adapted from Gravity's Rainbowby Thomas Pynchon.

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Mira Rosenthal's poems and translations have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the PEN American Center. She is the translator of The Forgotten Keysby Polish poet Tomasz Rozycki and a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University.